CHAPTER SIX

 

 

Pete Rodgers came from a large family. He was the fourth of eight children. Six of his seven siblings were still alive. Unless any of them hit the lottery, their ages indicated they would still be working. And they were. A few minutes of searching found them scattered throughout the east coast and Midwest. All of them had boring jobs that didn't interest me for this case.

Except one.

George Rodgers was an administrator at the Fairmont Regional Medical Center, named for the city in which it's located in West Virginia. I could not count Fairmont among the two cities in West Virginia I had ever heard of—Morgantown and Harpers Ferry—so I looked it up. Driving there from Oakland would take about ninety minutes. A regional hospital would have access to all manners of drugs. George could hook up Pete and his shrink with some. I hypothesized this was how Jim Shelton got his medication.

A quick job search told me the salary I could expect to earn as a candidate for hospital administrator jobs. I then poked around until I found where George Rodgers did his banking and investing. My degree is in computer science, so I'm pretty good at math. Even if I weren't, though, I could have deduced something fishy in George's books. Unless he'd been working for about fifty years—almost quadruple the length of his current career—he couldn't have saved and stashed all the money he did.

I looked deeper. George's paycheck hit his savings account every two weeks. He also made small cash deposits once a month, as well as large investments in his brokerage account around the same time. Another savings account showed irregular cash deposits and ATM withdrawals. If I didn't know better, I'd think George was a drug dealer.

Hospitals received medications all the time. Some were boring, like aspirin and Tylenol, and even though you could buy a bottle of them for three dollars, the hospital would still charge you four bills per pill. Nice racket if you can create it. Other drugs they get are more interesting and far more regulated. Opioid medicines, for instance, required someone to account for them at each step of their journey. Despite this, they ended up stolen and distributed illegally with alarming frequency.

I wondered if the withdrawals from the savings account were payments to delivery people or suppliers. Here's some cash to look the other way while I grab this box. Then the contents of that box could be sold, generating funds for the deposits I saw. The amount of money meant it would need to be more than an occasional box. I knew some rich people who could have lived nicely on George's money.

Rich needed to know this. It was another path to the investigation. We could drive to West Virginia and nose around. Rich would complain about jurisdiction, but he was already out of his. I, at least, was licensed to investigate all over the state of Maryland. I wouldn't want to involve anyone on the other side of the border. We needed to confine the investigative task force to the two of us. I shut everything down and walked next door to Rich's room.

I wished I had more information.

***

"I want to bring in the FBI," Rich said when I brain-dumped everything to him.

I hadn't expected him to want to run to the feds. There were jurisdiction concerns and there was punting to the goddamn FBI. On top of that, I didn't want to tell them how I got my information, or even what information I had on George Rodgers. "Well, you've certainly proposed a solution," I said.

"You don't agree?"

"Of course not."

"Let me guess," he said, "you don't want to share your info with the feds."

"I don't even want them to know that I have info," I said. "If it's all the same, I'd prefer to keep my intelligence-gathering methods out of this. They're going to have too many questions."

"I think this is getting bigger than you and me."

"How? So far, we know Land of the Brave looks shady. We know the boss has a brother who might be making money buying and selling drugs out of his hospital. This isn't a drug cartel in action here."

Rich crossed his arms under his chest. "You want to risk the investigation because of your shady methods," he said, shaking his head. "Incredible."

"What's the risk to the investigation?" I said. "You and I can do this."

"I think there are more people involved than a charity director and a hospital boss."

"Sure. They have to have a driver or two somewhere. And they have the four assholes we sent to the hospital. If those are the best goons they can muster up, I'm not worried."

"This is about Jim!" Rich's face grew red. "I want justice for Jim, justice for his family, justice for—"

"Yourself?"

Rich sighed and glared at me. "I was going to say his kids. But I'm his friend. So yes, for myself, too."

"I don't think we should bring in the feds," I said. "We can do this."

"We have people in Maryland and West Virginia involved," said Rich. "That's interstate crime."

"Great. You bring in the feds. And when they take over everything, lock you out, and bungle it, don't say I didn't warn you. And even if they don't fuck it up, you're looking at months to get your justice. Hope you have a lot of vacation days." I turned toward the door.

"Where are you going?"

"Back to Baltimore," I said. "You bring in the FBI, I'm out."

"How are you going to get there?" Rich said.

"I'll take an Uber." I grabbed the knob and pulled the door open.

"Wait."

I stopped.

"I still think this is bigger than the two of us."

"Have fun getting stonewalled by the FBI, then," I said.

"If I don't call them, what would your next steps be?"

"I want to look into the brother and his hospital."

"And if we build a case against him?"

"Then we close it," I said, turning back to face Rich. "You came out here to get justice for your friend. If you want to farm that out to someone else, whatever. Up to you. But you're not getting justice then. Someone else is."

"I don't see it the same way," said Rich.

"You and I often see these things differently."

Rich uncrossed and crossed his arms again. He pursed his lips, rolled his eyes, shook his head. If steam poured out his ears, I would consider my triumph complete. "Thanks to you," he said, "I'm not convinced we can trust the locals."

"Agreed."

"Fine. We'll keep it small for now. If this gets too big for us, though, I'm going to call in some help."

"Not the feds?" I said.

"State Police," Rich said. "I know a guy. He's trustworthy. We can work with him."

"Who decides if the case overwhelms us?"

"I do. My judgment. If you don't like it, go call your fucking Uber."

I grinned. "Really, Rich?"

"What?"

"You don't call an Uber. You use the app."

Rich chuckled and uncrossed his arms. "Go back to your room," he said.

So I did.

 

 

***

My father's deep exhalation over the phone made a sibilant hiss in my ear. "I'm not sure this is what we envisioned when we set this up, son," he said.

When I left Hong Kong after thirty-nine months, it was with the strong encouragement of the Chinese government. They arrested my hacker friends and me. They threw a bunch of charges at us, but the ones they cared about the most were helping Americans and dissidents hide from the government or leave the country. Most of those things fell on me. My compatriots were into embarrassing the communists, going after their banks, and similar things. I did some of that, too, but even then, my conscience reared its ugly head and compelled me to help people.

After returning to the States, my parents threatened to cut me off from the family money unless I got a job helping people. Seeing as I had burned through most of my money in China, I was forced to consider their position. Before long, I settled on being a private investigator, and got my license thanks to some embellishment of the legitimacy of my work in China. The kicker was, I wouldn't charge my clients. My parents hired me into their foundation and would pay me for solving cases. So far, this arrangement chafed me but worked reasonably well. Until this case, apparently.

"What do you mean, Dad?"

"Rich wasn't who we had in mind for your clients."

"I told you the details of the case," I said. "You don't think the family sounds like they need help?"

"I guess so," he said. "It's just . . . irregular, is all. Clients usually come to you."

"Rich did."

"You know what I mean."

"Do you think it was easy for him, Dad? You know how Rich and I have gotten along—or not—over the years. Since I started this job, he's taken every chance he could to run down the way I do things."

"You never thought he had a point?" said my father.

"I'm sure he does," I said, "but Rich and I are very different people. He has trouble with anyone who doesn't do things by the book."

"What are you getting at, son?"

"My point is, it took a lot for Rich to approach me for help. He had to swallow his pride and choke down a bunch of objections about my methods. I could have given him shit for coming to me, but I recognized what it took for him to do it. Maybe you should, too."

Silence was my only reply for a few seconds. Then my father said, "All right. I think you've got a point. We'll be interested to hear how this one turns out."

"So will I," I said.

"Should your mother start looking for western Maryland newspapers?"

"Dad, I'm not sure the two of you could be seen reading a paper called the Republican. What would your rich liberal friends think?"

"I'll let your mother worry about it," he said. We both knew she would. It was probably the thing she did best in the world. Well, maybe tied with sniffing and tsking after I offended her sensibilities. "What are you going to do next?"

"I think we're going to poke around the organization," I said. "They're our best lead right now. Maybe our only lead."

"Good luck, son. You're a long way from Baltimore."

I looked at my motel room. It didn't offer a view of Route 219, but the images had been seared into my head the last couple days. "Don't I know it," I said.